Lord Young of Cookham (Con)

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, who reminded the committee of the importance of data. I join him and others in complimenting the noble Baroness on her chairmanship. Her earlier career gave her unparalleled skills in interrogation. While welcoming much of the Government’s response, I was disappointed with their principal response. That is because the substance of our report is captured in its title, Social Mobility: Local Roots, Lasting Change, and if there is one paragraph in the report that sums it up, it is paragraph 236: “We have further concluded that those initiatives are best taken forward by local government, working in collaboration with Skills England and … universities, FE Colleges, schools and local employers, and, crucially, the DWP”. However, in the introduction to the Government’s response this concept of devolution of responsibility and a fresh approach is totally absent. Worse, the Government then reject what I regard as our key recommendation that we should build on the eight youth trailblazers. That was kicked into touch: “We expect to publish interim findings during the next two years and will develop the value for money assessment once longer term impacts have developed”. Rest in peace. But the committee’s message was actually received by the new Prime Minister, who made a speech on this issue shortly after he became Prime Minister. The message was this: “The current local government restructure and the creation of mayoral combined authorities is an opportunity for Government to devolve the power and resources needed for those authorities to lead work, through local partnerships with schools, colleges, universities and employers and Skills England, to promote social mobility and address the acute NEET problem”. That is exactly what we recommended but it was not reflected in the Government’s response, which was published after Mr Burnham became Prime Minister. There is another point that I want to make. During the Recess I read Jeremy Hunt’s book Can We Be Rich Again? This is what he said about the DWP budget on unemployment: “Can national employment programmes ever be as sensitive to local or individual situations as those run locally? The whole system would be far more tailored to individual situations if we devolved responsibility for getting people back into work to elected mayors or unitary authorities. If they were allowed to keep a proportion of any savings made, we would be likely to see a far quicker rise in the number of adults in work than by relying on a centralised national bureaucracy”. That is exactly in line with our report. Devolving budgets and devolving responsibility locally would indeed bring about lasting change here.